From time to time we’d almost forget that we are living in Switzerland. If there wouldn’t be these special Swiss quirks. It’s not just Lindt chocolate, the Swiss sense of cleanliness and orderliness and the referendums. No, there are plenty more celebrations, festivities and sports which may appear quite archaic if you are not born in Switzerland. For instance, three years ago we were able to see the famous Ehringer fighting cows in action. They normally fight for the leadership of the group before spending the summer up the mountain. When we saw them, they didn’t show much interest in fighting but prefered to graze along the ring.

Today was about fighting too. But instead of cows there were men fighting. The cantonal competition of a national sport called Schwingen took place near our town today. Schwingen is a Swiss version of wrestling, I guess. The men are wearing a special kind of pants on which they cling to while trying to push their opponent to the ground. The opponent has to touch the ground either with two shoulders or with 2/3 of his back. One shoulder doesn’t count – which leads to exactly the same movements on the ground that the hobbit normally does when we try to get nose drops into his nose. It is a surprisingly entertaining sport! Also, weight classes don’t exist, so sometimes you have real giants who fight against guys who are at least two heads smaller. That’s quite exciting. Normally the small ones are simply lifted up in the air where they are relaxing for a while. But they win suprisingly often – we think it might be thanks to a good leverage.

The top prize was, by the way, a bull. You could also win a cow, a foal or a goat. But I have read that it is more about the glory than about the prize. Which makes sense, because in the end owning a bull in a city like Zurich seems rather unhandy.

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About erdhummel

Familial entropy - that's an insight into our current life which has been fundamentally changed last summer when our daughter was born. Having studied in Cottbus, Germany, and worked/studied in Edinburgh, Scotland, we momentarily live in a small town in Switzerland where Karsten is trying to save the environment and Freddie is trying to save our sanity. Since there is not much time for elaborate, long emails while doing that, we thought a blog might be a good option to smuggle ourselves into the lifes of our friends.